We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
heated by ordinary gas-stoves in the fireplaces, with the elementary safety provision of wire fire-guards — a very shocking and blameworthy practice when you are dealing with celluloid, but that had nothing to do with the present puzzle. As I saw it the air was warm and damp, there was moisture everywhere and there was moist gelatine with a small quantity of glycerine in it to keep it pliable. And the symptom never occurred in small doses: either there was no sign of it or the whole shooting match was affected.
Should I have said mfected, I wondered? Here were all the optimum conditions for a gelatine culture of micro-organisms — and in the air there are bacteria everywhere. The films were suffering from a disease which attacked them like an epidemic. If this suggested deduction were correct the cure was obvious and easy. Any bactericidal disinfectant which would not harm the film ought to scotch the disease. So I added a trace of formaldehyde to the final bath of very diluted glycerine and water, and the trouble disappeared, never again to return.
While the films were young and still short enough to be easily handled, we introduced the staining of various scenes to enhance the effect as I have already mentioned in the case of the ScottBrown films — blue for night, red for firelight and so on. Then we sometimes added toning, quite a different chemical process which often gave very attractive results, and this sort of work continued until a foreign film-stock maker, Gevaert, I think, began making film with the stain incorporated in the celluloid, which saved us a lot of trouble, but added the difficulty that we had to sort out the film-stock into colours before we started printing.
When I visited Rochester, New York, I tried to persuade George Eastman — a delightful personality, by the way — to let me have film-stock in thousand-foot lengths, instead of my having to join up the short rolls to suit my developing machines. But he said that although he made and coated in that length it was more convenient to cut to the four hundred and two hundred foot lengths that other people wanted and he could not make special arrangements for me.
It was quite early in his career that Stanley Faithfull, despite his manifest inexperience, was sent up to Glasgow and other places in Scotland to sell films — his first long journey ever, and one that brought him a rather unhappy experience. In the train coming back, an old Scotsman, drinking heavily, suddenly missed
79